Children Educate Themselves III: Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers

How hunter-gatherer children learn without schools.

For hundreds of thousands of years, up until the time when agriculture was invented (a mere 10,000 years ago), we were all hunter-gatherers. Our human instincts, including all of the instinctive means by which we learn, came about in the context of that way of life. And so it is natural that in this series on children's instinctive ways of educating themselves I should ask: How do hunter-gatherer children learn what they need to know to become effective adults within their culture?

In the last half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed many groups of people—in remote parts Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and elsewhere—who had maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by modern ways. Although each group studied had its own language and other cultural traditions, the various groups were found to be similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of "the hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. Wherever they were found, hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands (of about 25 to 50 people per band), made decisions democratically, had ethical systems that centered on egalitarian values and sharing, and had rich cultural traditions that included music, art, games, dances, and time-honored stories.

To supplement what we could find in the anthropological literature, several years ago Jonathan Ogas (then a graduate student) and I contacted a number of anthropologists who had lived among hunter-gatherers and asked them to respond to a written questionnaire about their observations of children's lives. Nine such scholars kindly responded to our questionnaire. Among them, they had studied six different hunter-gatherer cultures—three in Africa, one in Malaysia, one in the Philippines, and one in New Guinea.

What I learned from my reading and our questionnaire was startling for its consistency from culture. Here I will summarize four conclusions, which I think are most relevant to the issue of self-education. Because I would like you to picture these practices as occurring now, I will use the present tense in describing them, even though the practices and the cultures themselves have been largely destroyed in recent years by intrusions from the more "developed" world around them.

1. Hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount to become successful adults.

It would be a mistake to think that education is not a big issue for hunter-gatherers because they don't have to learn much. In fact, they have to learn an enormous amount.

To become effective hunters, boys must learn the habits of the two or three hundred different species of mammals and birds that the band hunts; must know how to track such game using the slightest clues; must be able to craft perfectly the tools of hunting, such as bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, snares or nets; and must be extraordinarily skilled at using those tools.

To become effective gatherers, girls must learn which of the countless varieties of roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in their area are edible and nutritious, when and where to find them, how to dig them (in the case of roots and tubers), how to extract the edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and certain plant fibers), and in some cases how to process them to make them edible or increase their nutritional value. These abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge about the food materials.

In addition, hunter-gatherer children must learn how to navigate their huge foraging territory, build huts, make fires, cook, fend off predators, predict weather changes, treat wounds and diseases, assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony within their group, negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make music, and engage in various dances and rituals of their culture. Since there is little specialization beyond that of men as hunters and women as gatherers, each person must acquire a large fraction of the total knowledge and skills of the culture.

2. The children learn all this without being taught.

Although hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount, hunter-gatherers have nothing like school. Adults do not establish a curriculum, or attempt to motivate children to learn, or give lessons, or monitor children's progress. When asked how children learn what they need to know, hunter-gatherer adults invariably answer with words that mean essentially: "They teach themselves through their observations, play, and exploration." Occasionally an adult might offer a word of advice or demonstrate how to do something better, such as how to shape an arrowhead, but such help is given only when the child clearly desires it. Adults to not initiate, direct, or interfere with children's activities. Adults do not show any evidence of worry about their children's education; millennia of experience have proven to them that children are experts at educating themselves.[1]

3. The children are afforded enormous amounts of time to play and explore.

In response to our question about how much time children had for play, the anthropologists we surveyed were unanimous in indicating that the hunter-gatherer children they observed were free to play most if not all of the day, every day. Typical responses are the following:

• "[Batek] children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens." (Karen Endicott.)

• "Both girls and boys [among the Nharo] had almost all day every day free to play." (Alan Barnard.)

• "[Efé] boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15-17; for girls most of the day, in between a few errands and some babysitting, was spent in play." (Robert Bailey.)

• "[!Kung] children played from dawn to dusk. " (Nancy Howell.)

The freedom that hunter-gatherer children enjoy to pursue their own interests comes partly from the adults' understanding that such pursuits are the surest path to education. It also comes from the general spirit of egalitarianism and personal autonomy that pervades hunter-gatherer cultures and applies as much to children as to adults [2]. Hunter-gatherer adults view children as complete individuals, with rights comparable to those of adults. Their assumption is that children will, of their own accord, begin contributing to the economy of the band when they are developmentally ready to do so. There is no need to make children or anyone else do what they don't want to do. It is remarkable to think that our instincts to learn and to contribute to the community evolved in a world in which our instincts were trusted!

4. Children observe adults' activities and incorporate those activities into their play.

Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp—the preparations to move, the building of huts, the making and mending of tools and other artifacts, the food preparation and cooking, the nursing and care of infants, the precautions taken against predators and diseases, the gossip and discussions, the arguments and politics, the dances and festivities. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips.

The children not only observe all of these activities, but they also incorporate them into their play, and through that play they become skilled at the activities. As they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the group.

For example boys who one day are playfully hunting butterflies with their little bows and arrows are, on a later day, playfully hunting small mammals and bringing some of them home to eat, and on yet a later day are joining men on real hunting trips, still in the spirit of play. As another example, both boys and girls commonly build play huts, modeled after the real huts that their parents build. In her response to our questionnaire, Nancy Howell pointed out that !Kung children commonly build a whole village of play huts a few hundred yards from the real village. The play village then becomes a playground where they act out many of the kinds of scenes that they observe among adults.

The respondents to our survey referred also to many other examples of valued adult activities that were emulated regularly by children in play. Digging up roots, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, story telling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. Because all this play occurs in an age-mixed environment, the smaller children are constantly learning from the older ones.

Nobody has to tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it naturally because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective adults.

What relevance might these observations have for education in our culture?

Our culture, of course, is very different from hunter-gatherer cultures. You might well doubt that the lessons about education that we learn from hunter-gatherers can be applied effectively in our culture today. For starters, hunter-gatherers do not have reading, writing, or arithmetic; maybe the natural, self-motivated means of learning don't work for learning the three R's. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, there are countless different ways of making a living, countless different sets of skills and knowledge that children might acquire, and it is impossible for children in their daily lives to observe all those adult skills directly. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, children are largely segregated from the adult work world, which reduces their opportunities to see what adults do and incorporate those activities into their play.

Yet, in the next installment, I am going to argue that the same natural means of learning that work so well for hunter-gatherers indeed do work equally well for our children, when we provide an educational setting that allows those means to work. My next installment, which I expect to post on Wednesday, August 13, will be about a school in Framingham, Massachusetts, where, for the past 40 years, children and teenagers have been educating themselves with extraordinary success through their self-directed play and exploration.

The modern world has created so many complex artificial hoops like AP tests, entrance exams, proper brown-nosing techniques to use with the boss, etc if our reality was anywhere near in touch with it's genuine roots as opposed to shiny facades, this type of observational education might work. In the meantime, the robot factory is running at full steam.

It's true that the robot factory appears to be up and running, full steam. However, you know, when we examine a system that is already in place, it is facile to come up with negative commentary. I'm guilty of this, too, as a parent who is not at all satisfied with much of the learning system in place as it is today. What I'm interested in is what you seem to be getting to, Mr. Gray--the what DOES work, instead of the what DOESN'T. In that vein, I wonder if direct observation by children of the adults immediately surrounding them in the context of our current society may be exactly what is needed when you factor in the various unsavory social cues (i.e., brown nosing) rampant and in some cases unavoidable. I mean, do we want our children to be like the proficient liars, ambitious cut-throats, and self-efacing puppets whom we work with (who we are)?

I think it is important to see what your next post will entail, and I want to discover if what works on a small scale could indeed supplant the school system we know and revile today. I'll be honest here and point out that our teachers are doing a helluva job with limited resources, reticent students, over-ambitious parents, and less than satisfactory learning settings. I don't fault the people. Indeed, if what you write in your next post is a system that can be impelemented structure-wide, I want to know what's the hold up?

Thank you both for your insightful comments. You anticipate a point that I will touch on in my next posting and will focus on even more in a future posting.

When we think about creating an educational environment for children and teenagers our number one concern should be how to create a MORAL environment. The educational environment should be one in which the adults as well as the children and teenagers present are held accountable for their actions and where everyone takes part in the legislative and judicial process of the school. The adults in such a setting should be people who represent, in their daily behavior, our highest values. They should be creative and productive, but most of all they should be moral, kind-hearted, and loving.

In any setting, including our traditional schools, the most important lessons that children learn come not from the verbal lessons taught but from the behavior that is actually modeled by others who are present.

An unfortunate aspect of our public school system is that students are more or less trapped with whatever teacher they are assigned to. They do not have the opportunity to seek out adults whom they admire, but rather must spend hours every day in the classroom with just one or at most two adults, who may or may not be people they can (or should) look up to.

It has been great to find you on the Web, making these arguments in favor of humane, intelligent, loving education. I share your conviction that children can, in a rich, supportive environment, learn all that they need to know without coercion. There are schools now that practice this kind of education. I've been associated with one of them for over twenty years.
It's strange to find A.S. Neill's Summerhill missing from your references. Started in 1921 and still going, Summerhill was the inspiration for Sudbury Valley and hundreds of free and democratic schools such as the amazing, urban Albany Free School. I work at one in a public system in Canada: ALPHA Alternative School in Toronto has been operating since 1972. Interestingly, such schools from Summerhill to ALPHA have found that in order for everyone to know one another and to get together to make decisions, a school needs to be a multi-age community of no more than about 80 kids-about the size of many of the hunter-gatherer communities you talk about.
ALPHA's founders lobbied the public school system for their alternative school because they felt strongly that different models of schooling need to be accessible to all incomes, and that the child care aspect of schooling could not be dismissed. As urban neighbourhoods become more hostile to children and families more isolated, ALPHA's families opt for an alternative school rather than unschooling, to offer kids the chance to play and learn in community.
There are not more schools like ALPHA because, as you point out, the conditions are hostile to them. Even private ones are under legal attack. The public system does not fund enough teachers or space, and it is loathe to allow its schools the independence they need to fulfill their mandates. ALPHA was founded by parents, and their volunteer labor supports kids efforts, supervises for safety, nurtures them and defends the school from the powers that be. This is exhausting for, while it is proud of its alternatives, the School Board in Toronto constantly works at making them more like every other school.
As a result, ALPHA is very compromised. But our kids self-govern at meetings and have a kid-run justice system, the 4-8 year olds spend much of the day in play and in self-chosen work. We are more pro-active about offering literacy than we were in the old days, but our parents continue to reject report cards and refuse to allow their kids to take the mandated Grade 3 and Grade 6 tests.
Aspects of ALPHA that could benefit kids in any school and any system are its mandate to help kids instead of judging them, and a social atmosphere in which kids learn a great deal from each other. There is no cheating at ALPHA, just helping and being helped.
Again, most school systems will not allow this. It's a hard fight.

Thank you, Deb, for this reminder about Summerhill and your report on what is happening at ALPHA. Sudbury Valley has been fortunate to be in a state (Massachusetts) where, as long as you don't take public money, and as long as you keep the local school board convinced, you can develop and maintain a school where students really are in full charge. It's been going for 43 years, is stronger than ever, and has never had to compromise its philosophy. All the kids, 4 to 18 years old, are continuously in charge of their own education. It works. If only the world would take a look. Best wishes. -Peter

There is some element of the hunter-gatherer observation/play learning at work today in farm families and other small, family owned businesses. Young girls exhibit this behaviour with their dolls, toy kitchens, etc. In our society, most of work is removed from the child's environment as noted in previous post and when children attend school, the process becomes almost removed from reality and certainly is more prescribed. There are efforts to reconnect education to the work world with things like contextual learning.

I think it would be interesting to imagine a context where children learn math for example by observing and playing.

I believe we might learn a lot about learning by looking through the lense of the hunter-gatherer.

Good point about the fact that children today do, in many contexts,learn through observation and play.

Your point about math stimulates many thoughts. I think we make a big mistake to try to teach math abstractly, as if it is something to learn for its own sake. I remember as kid, in about third grade, thinking how strange it was that so many of my friends were baffled by long division in school but had no trouble figuring out their own batting averages.

For most of us math is a tool, and when it is learned as a tool it comes pretty easily and naturally. I have seen kids learn lots of math in the context of playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (which involves multi-sided dice and an understanding of probability), or in playful cooking (where recipes have to be cut down or multiplied), etc. When people learn math for concrete purposes it makes sense and they remember it and don't develop the kind of math phobias that are so rampant among the products of our school system.

I believe we have a lot to be taught about these people that many still call "primitives". I believe that the educational system hinders creativity and hides our potential. If you want check out a few things I've written at http://encefalus.com/cognitive/bolster-your-creativity/

That's very clearly expressed. I nievely learned all that by reading the New Testament (which is a revival of egalitarian hunter-gather ethics) and Peter Freuchen's "Book of the Eskimos" in the 1950s, and then found it scientifically worked out in Val Geist's 1978 "Life Strategies, Human Evolution, Environmental Design: Towards a biological theory of health."

Yes, it works just as well now as it did in the h-g societies, as every unschooling parent and offspring will tell you. The principles of unschooling are that "learning grows out of day-to-day situations, scholars have a free choice of what and when to study, no work is done to be wasted, and there is no evaluation for the sake of evaluation." -- see http://www.ontariohomeschool.org/HRLeeds.html -- which also quotes Geist on education.

Great post. While I have doubts about the neo-Hobbesian approach to evolutionary psychology, there's no question that we've got a lot to learn from pre-agricultural societies. It's fascinating, for example, that even in these most remote societies restricted to the land nobody has bothered to invade and conquer, the children are free to play all day. One thing we can conclude about a society where kids aren't expected to do any serious work until their late teens is that life is far from a Hobbesian struggle for survival. Play implies plenty.

What most people don't realize is that hunter-gatherer adults also had lots of leisure time and engaged in much play. Research has shown that the average work week (of hunting, gathering, and other survival activities) is about 20 to 25 hours. Marshall Sahlins, in "Stone Age Economics" (1972) refers to hunter-gatherer society as "the original affluent society," not because they have so much but because their needs are so little that they easily meet those needs--so they have lots of time to play, dance, make music, tell stories, and talk.
-Peter

When I was 10 I had a teacher who employed this approach as much as he could within a school environment. In the first term of the three term year we knocked off all the prescribed maths, spelling etc. that was in the curriculum for the next two years. This freed us up to do project that interested us - where we chose what we did and how we spent our time.

In addition the teacher got our parents to organise weekly outings to businesses and institutions where we went and observed how they worked. We them acted these processes out in the class room. One of these acts was to develop a factory in the class room where we produced a stuffed toy that was all the rage at the time.

I was also fortunate enough to be brought up at a time where there was much less structured activity, much more time for play and less anxiety about children getting hurt or injured. I made bows and arrows, catapults and learned how to hunts, trap, fish, make fires and the like. In addition I learned to grow vegetables, make explosives, fix engines, weld. solder, use a lathe, brew beer, make boats, experiment with different art techniques etc, all without adults telling me or encouraging me to do this stuff.

And what you are suggesting about learning via exploring what interests you, it applies to adult learning too. Systems thinker, Russell Ackoff, pointed out that most of we learn at work we actually learn at work - not at university. He pointed out that both the architect and the statistician that were at the time of his survey rated as the most influential in their fields had no formal training in these fields.

In my opinion what we call schooling is really "child minding" that frees up adults to join the workforce. The logic of the process is reinforced by people with vested interests. Evolution is an emergent process - bottom up. Schooling is mostly top down and embeds conceptual frameworks in our unconscious that dumbs down our natural curiosity and emergent innovative learning processes.

I homeschool my kids, and they do nothing but "play" and investigate what interests them until they are 8, at which point they pick up a slightly more structured learning, but still very relaxed.

- My oldest taught herself to read at 4, literally begging me to help her because I didn't want to push her
- She taught her brother to read before he was 5, and together, they taught their younger brother to read, also before 5. For them, this was play, because they were emulating me (I am a huge reader). This was completely unstructured learning.
- Math is everywhere. Board games - roll two dice and add the numbers together, and you're learning math facts. Change up the game so you have to multiply the numbers, and you're learning multiplication. My kids help me with cooking, as stated, doubling or halving recipes. I make cookies and ask how many each child gets - division.
- When you encourage a child to love learning, they will learn for fun. I caught my daughter in her room memorizing random multiplication facts "because she wanted to remember what 12x12 was." Today she brought me a long division problem she wanted me to help her walk through. I asked what she was figuring out, and she said she was doing it "for fun."
- Also for fun, my kids have run a number of businesses, from a recycling pickup biz to selling homemade cookies door to door. They had to figure out costs and profits, and how to divide up the money.
- Last month my 8 yo found a cocoon in the woods. She brought it home and went online to figure out what kind of insect was inside. Then she read everything about that kind of moth so she could figure out what she needed to feed it. When it hatched, it turned out she had figured it up correctly.
- My kids have their own blank notebooks, and they write and draw in them all the time. Stories, poems, and pictures. My daughter wrote a one page report "all about horses", again for fun.

Obviously, my children are highly intelligent and creative, but I think everything they achieve on a daily basis could be done by so many of the children in America today. The key thing I wanted to give them from homeschooling is that they maintain that love of learning; then anything I fail to teach them, they will have the desire and willingness to look it up themselves.

Even adults who work 40 hour weeks don't sit at their desks all day. They get up, walk around, talk to co-workers. They may have to do projects they don't want to, but at least they know that, for whatever reasons, they chose to be there - even if it is just purely economic. Imagine forcing adults to be treated like public school kids - there would be a mass rebellion.

Kids are smarter and more curious than we give them credit for.

As for older, by the time they are teenagers, my kids won't be taking part time jobs at Mickey Ds. If my daughter still wants to be a vet, she can get a job at a vets office. If my son wants to work for a radio station, he can get a job there. Even if they are just doing janitor work, they will have the opportunity to learn what the field entails. College will be a mere technicality for them; they will learn more in their chosen field(s) beforehand, even if it's just that they don't actually want to do that job.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. As a home schooler myself, my thoughts immediately went to the more natural learning environment our children learn in. They are not segregated by age and are free to learn from many age groups and many daily life examples. Like you, we include our children in our daily lives. Not only do they know how to read and do math, they realize what a trip to the grocery store entails, that bills must be paid on time, and that keeping up with appointments is a must. These are real life skills that are completely left out of public education.

I like to say that for all I have taught my children I am most proud of the things I have not taught them. I'll expound for those who don't understand. I, for example, can not see a classic car driving down the road and tell you year, make, and model and what was new to the design that year. My son can because he loves to read about old cars. I can not tell you what year a certain fashion debuted or what that retro item now costs if you want to obtain it. My daughter can because she loves to read about fashion history. I could not tell you that the red panda was more closely related to raccoons than pandas until my son told me so on one of our trips to the zoo. He had read it in a book.
Children are naturally inquisitive and wired to learn. I think it is we as adults who attempt to package it and force feed it who often times kill this. I can still remember the first time I was sitting on the couch and the light flicked off, then on, then off and I looked to find my toddler on a stool by the light switch. Funny but I had not shown her this was how the light worked or that she could use that little handle to open the car door, or that the nob in the bathroom would turn on the water. They learned this by watching me and observing.
If we strip our homes of (or at least place limits on) distractions such as TV and video games it is amazing what our children are capable of. Mine spend more time learning music, or doing a creative project like sewing, or arranging the advertising collectibles acquired than they do in front of a TV or on the the phone. They are almost twelve and fourteen incidentally.
I loved this article because it affirmed what I already knew. Children want to learn, they want to succeed, and if we don't kill that they will.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. Your conclusions agree with a member of a panel of education pioneers I heard talk recently about a curriculum-free school where children had a pretend village with shops etc. that made it necessary for them to want answers to questions about profit calculations and so on.

3 days after the workman repairing our playground wall left, a group of 6 year olds gathered stones and made mud cement, then proceeded to build a wall. it stood very soundly until the next time it rained. they had (seemingly) taken no notice of the workman but all his actions and skill were evident in their reconstruction.
Compulsory school is very recent in England,until 1870 most children learnt what they needed to do not in school, but in helping their parents and in palying with other children. my grandfather started school in 1878 at the age of six; his first lesson was to knit a pair of garters to hold up his socks. he left school at the age of 11 and was an astonishingly knowledgable man, interested in learning until he died at age 91. Do we place too much emphasis on school and qualifications? we can learn anything if we WANT to, the enigma of school is finding how to inform children through emulation and inspiration.

Dear Prof Gray,
I read your book Free to Learn with intense interest, and I find your blog posts fascinating too. They’ve lead me to challenge some long held ideas I’ve had about education, childhood, learning and life.
However, I have one concern I wanted to ask you about: you write so eloquently about how hunter gatherer children learn by playing to become the skilled adults doing all sorts of complex work in their communities. This makes a lot of sense to me. However, doesn’t this work mainly because the children have close access to the adults in their communities, and they are able to observe the adults at work, and join in? I don’t doubt the principle— I have no trouble believeing that if a 4 year old were allowed to play in a hospital and follow around doctors all day, she could grow up to be a competent diagnostician and healer herself without any instruction by the time she was 18.
However, kids in Sudbury valley schools don’t have access to adults going about their daily lives in this way. The adults (however accomplished they may be) are still not demonstrating what adult work looks like (other than as work as a Sudbury Valley staff member). I’m guessing that these kids grow up just as clueless about what adults do as kids in public schools (and maybe stumble into a career or college program because they had no idea what else to do). It makes sense that play has evolved to help kids grow into competent adults, but if they aren’t actually observing real adults at work, isn’t this a rather major problem with the philosophy? If you agree, could you explain how Sudbury Schools work well despite this? Thanks so much if you could reply—I’d love to hear your insights.

Good question, Sarah. Sudbury Valley is an age-mixed environment with about 180 kids and 7 or 8 adult staff members. The kids learn largely by observing other kids, especially older ones. Kids come into the school from various homes, where they are in contact with various types of skills. At the school young children see older ones reading, calculating (e.g. in games), using computers in various ways, cooking, making various things, playing sports, etc. etc. and they want to do those things. So, they are exposed in this way to the basic skills of our culture. In our culture there are so many ways of making a living that it would be impossible for anyone, even if we did allow it, to follow around and observe people in every variety of employment. What is essential is that children be exposed to the basic skills that cut across so many jobs, It is also the case that children get a lot of information about careers by watching television and, today, through the Internet.

Still, I do think it would be valuable if we provided more opportunities for young people to observe directly and explore the work environments that they think they might be interested in. Here is my blog post on that topic: Education’s Future: What Will Replace K-12 and College? Posted Nov. 13, 2017.